Apathy is not the word you were looking for in that last sentence. Something like negativity would work though.

Who the fuck is Al and why should I care if he predicts manhole explosions? What, is he psychic or something?

The article you linked to pulls electronic markets and speed trading together. Most of the benefits the article mentions are largely a byproduct of electronic markets, not the high speed traders. In fact, I didn't see a single point in that article that applied only to speed traders. The biggest flaw with speed trading is the fact that it's 100% artificial. It has nothing do with what the actual stocks are, merely with monitoring their price at a fine enough level to be able to buy and sell with just fractions of a cent in change. It doesn't reflect any real property of the market; it's merely another way to game the system. What's the solution to the problem? I don't know. Perhaps we just need to limit the number of trades that can be done per second. But it is an entirely artificial and potentially quite damaging phenomenon.

How much would have to be paid to stare at penises all day?

It's easier to remember a somthing.com than something.city.state.us or something.state.gov, if your state even has a direct .gov domain. Plus I wonder how long it would take for one of those domains to be provisioned. And I agree, this guy is a schmuck. If you don't want to be caught speeding, don't speed.

Gee, I wonder if Chrome had the site in cache, since you've used it before. Reset both browsers to a clean state and then you may have a valid comparison.

One of my favorite episodes.

WTF is the point of a digicam with a grayscale screen? I remember pictures taken with an old QuickTake 100 with fondness, but not enough to pay $199 to recreate its capabilities.

2gigs time 0k/sec is 0, not unlimited.

He was probably referring to the Tuskegee experiments. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment

Perhaps in 1790 that's all the census needed to know (that and how may slaves you owned), but it's a far different situation now. Socioeconomic and ethnic data is important in determining the types of services various areas need and plays an important part in know just who an "American" really is. As an aside, the census had nothing to do with the Japanese internment during WWII. At most it made calculating the number of Japanese-Americans easier, allowing the round up to be more accurate. Maybe. Given how easy it is to separate people by obvious ethnic ancestry, the round up would have occurred any way. Besides which, it's not as if either of scenarios mentioned in the OP actually provided anything more than numbers. They didn't provide addresses, names, or any actual personal information. Merely the number who marked a certain ethnicity in a certain county. So yes, these people are still just paranoid.

All companies, especially publicly held ones, should be forced to report their labor figures every quarter along with their financial information. Just like we should track capital flowing in and out of our country, we should be able to track jobs as well. Remember, the more you know...

Like an sysadmins go jogging.